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THE PERSONAL TOUCH

One virtue of mom-and-pop stores is that they evoke a Norman Rockwell neighborliness: friendly shopkeepers who shoot the breeze with their customers. The small-town vibe is one of the main reasons mixed-use developers try to keep local stores in the mix. But there’s nothing to say national anchor stores can’t offer their customers the same sense of welcome, says Ken Becker, owner of MIXed-Use Advisors, a Las Vegas-based consulting firm. Becker’s strategy, executed with the help of property and store managers, is to develop customer-service policies for an entire Main Street project. “We encourage the retailers to call people by name,” he said. The idea is to persuade all tenants to emulate backslapping friendliness. “When it comes to Main Street projects, authenticity is a big deal,” Becker said. He couples this strategy with marketing campaigns heavy on special events designed to draw visitors from the surrounding trade area and contribute to a sense of community. “Because mixed-use is kind of a new concept, you need to do even more promotion,” he said. At the 40-acre Village of Centennial Springs, a mixed-use development in northwest Las Vegas, Becker programmed an event every weekend for the first year. Discount days that applied only to residents of the project also proved a hit. “If you can walk to a store, it’s easier to go there. We wanted to encourage that behavior.”

EMERGENCY CUSTOMER SERVICES

When the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills opened last July, it introduced a concept that has proved to be lifesaving. By stationing paramedics from the nearby Alle-Kiski Medical Center on the shopping center grounds, Galleria officials say the lives of four of its customers have been spared. Galleria Pittsburgh EMTs boast a one-to-two-minute response time to anywhere within the shopping center and surrounding properties. Jeff Polana, Alle-Kiski’s director of prehospital services, says an ambulance from the hospital itself would take about 10 minutes to respond to a call. Since a person is unlikely to recover after four minutes in cardiac arrest, Polana says the time difference is critical. “Rapid response and aggressive treatment increases a person’s chance of survival, and it also decreases the length of the hospital stay,” he said. From last July through March, the Galleria EMTs received 244 emergency calls, Polana says. Eighty-one of those patients were transported to Alle-Kiski, and 14 were admitted. Among those, three suffered cardiac arrest and one had a life-threatening allergic reaction to a bee sting. Polana says these four would not have survived if not for the center’s emergency response.

HOP, SKIP AND JUMP

The 22,800-square-foot SkyZone Recreational Center bounces into THF Realty’s Chesterfield (Mo.) Commons this month, offering shoppers an all-trampoline environment in which to exercise, play or just goof off. The first such venue opened in Las Vegas in 2004. Operated by St. Louis-based SkyZone, the facility allows people to play three-dimensional versions of popular team games on a field made up of more than 100 connected trampolines. Hyper-resilient trampoline walls and floors make a round of dodge ball considerably more interesting and unpredictable to play, for instance. The latest SkyZone facility is expected to draw upwards of 120,000 visitors to the 1.9 million-square-foot community center, says SkyZone CEO Richard Platt. Chesterfield Commons includes a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart.

RICH EXPERIENCES

Affluent consumers seem to be less concerned with buying Louis Vuitton luggage, plasma-screen TVs and other luxury goods and more focused on enjoying such experiences as dining out, travel and parties. So says Pamela Danziger, president of Stevens, Pa.-based consulting firm Unity Marketing, which just released its latest analysis of the 30.2 million U.S. households that earn upwards of $137,500 per year. Last year these consumers spent on average $52,588 per household for luxuries, up 3.8 percent from 2004.

Travel, dining, entertaining, spa treatments and similarly luxurious experiential services represent the fastest-growing expenditure category among the wealthy, Danziger says. Last year the typical affluent household spent nearly 5 percent less on such home luxuries as furnishings and electronics, and a relatively modest 5.6 percent more on such personal indulgences as apparel and jewelry, she says. By contrast, they spent nearly twice as much on experiences — $22,746 on average, up from $11,632 in 2004. Though the wealthy “will still buy luxury goods, what they really crave are life-changing experiences,” said Danziger. “It is in that direction where their spending will continue to shift.”

THE BILLION-DOLLAR CLUB

U.S. specialty retail concepts tend to run out of expansion steam after annual sales hit the $1 billion mark, because adding stores often creates oversaturation beyond that, observers say. Perhaps this explains why so many apparel chains are launching new concepts these days. Aeropostale, which is currently incubating its 14-store Jimmy’Z concept, exceeded that mark for the first time, posting $1.1 billion last year. And J. Crew and Guess, both of which are expected to hit $1 billion this year, have their own new concepts: the child-focused Crewcuts and the upscale, female-oriented Marciano, respectively. The billion-dollar club does have its benefits though, retailers say, as it allows leveraging of expenses and more-efficient management of merchandise pricing and flow.

TENANTS THAT HELP LANDLORDS SLEEP EASY

Full-service restaurants, personal service providers and sporting goods retailers are the most stable tenants a shopping center can have, in that order, according to ICSC. Over the past five years, these categories have exhibited the best combination of high sales growth and low volatility in terms of sales per square foot, says Bindu Nair, an ICSC research analyst. Though different landlords seek different tenant mixes, “it would not be far-fetched to look for tenants that offer both higher-than-average sales growth and lower-than-average volatility in sales productivity,” Nair wrote in a report. “Such retailers would thus be high-performing and ‘stable’ tenants.” In January, the most recent seasonally adjusted numbers available, restaurant tenants on average posted sales per square foot of $471 and a 6.6 percent rise in productivity versus a year previously. By contrast, toy stores posted sales per square foot of $410 and a 23.1 percent drop in productivity.